The Coming
Indictment of
Dick Cheney
and the Neo-Cons
by
Jeffrey Steinberg
As we
go to press, Americans are preparing to vote in the Nov. 2 elections.
Regardless of the outcome of the Presidential race, during the immediate
days and weeks ahead, Dick Cheney will finally be facing the music. The
Vice President has presided over one of the most corrupt Administrations
in American history, and the proximity of the Presidential elections has
postponed—but not quashed—a string of Federal grand jury and Congressional
probes of the Vice President and his neo-con allies in the Pentagon and in
his own "shadow national security council," housed in the Office of the
Vice President, and headed by Cheney's chief of staff and alter ego, I.
Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Among
Cheney's most recent election-eve damage-control efforts: the suppression
of a Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General's report on
intelligence failures, leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
According to recent reports in Newsweek, the New York Times,
and the Los Angeles Times, newly installed CIA Director Porter
Goss, a partisan Republican Cheney pick, put the kibosh on the release of
the IG report to Congress, despite the fact that the document was
completed in June. According to Los Angeles Times editorial writer
Robert Scheer, the CIA study names the names of top government officials
who sat on key intelligence leads prior to the attacks. Scheer quoted one
unnamed intelligence official: "It is infuriating that a report which
shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory
manner before [EMAIL PROTECTED] is being suppressed. The report is potentially very
embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they
weren't interested in terrorism before [EMAIL PROTECTED], or in holding people in the
government responsible afterwards."
The top
Bush Administration official who ignored [EMAIL PROTECTED] warnings and
suppressed legislation aimed at creating a Homeland Security Department
prior to the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks was none other
than Vice President Cheney, who was appointed by President Bush in May
2001 to head up a White House task force on terrorism. According to former
National Security Council counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, that task
force never held a single meeting, prior to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] attacks.
The
suppression of the IG report has provoked bipartisan anger from the
ranking members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Peter
Hoekstra (R-Mich.) and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who wrote a letter of
protest to Goss over the delay until after Nov. 2. More recently, Sen. Jay
Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence, also wrote to Goss, protesting the stall.
The IG
report was the result of a 17-month probe by an 11-person CIA team.
Another CIA official told the Los Angeles Times, "No previous
director of CIA has ever tried to stop the inspector general from
releasing a report to the Congress, in this case a report requested by
Congress." Indeed, Newsweek reported that, following the
publication of the Scheer article, Goss's top aides ordered the Office of
Security to launch a probe into the leak. Senior U.S. intelligence sources
have told EIR that Cheney hand-picked Goss to take the CIA post
with one over-riding mandate: Block any pre-election leaks from within
the CIA bureaucracy.
'Minister of
Disinformation'
Adding
to the pattern of exposés of Cheney interference in the national security
intelligence process, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on
the Senate Armed Services Committee, released a 46-page report on Oct. 21,
documenting the fabrication of intelligence prior to the U.S. invasion of
Iraq. While the Levin report's findings centered on the office of
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, which created an
illegal parallel intelligence unit, outside the purview of the
Intelligence Community (IC), to peddle a stream of disinformation on
Iraq's non-existent ties to al-Qaeda, the report highlighted the personal
role of Cheney. Sen. John Kerry recently aptly called Cheney "the Chief
Minister of Disinformation" in the Bush Administration.
Senator
Kerry knows, all too well, the personal role that the Vice President
played in marching America into the Iraq quagmire. As the Senator has
confided to several colleagues, it was a personal visit by the Vice
President to Senator Kerry that convinced the latter to vote in favor of
the Iraq war resolution in October 2002, which gave President Bush an
unconstitutional Congressional green light to launch a needless and
disastrous "preventive war." Vice President Cheney lied to Senator Kerry,
and, presumably, to scores of other hesitant legislators, that the
Administration had hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had an advanced
nuclear weapons program, and that it was the threat of a nuclear-armed
Iraq that justified the preventive war to unseat Saddam Hussein and
capture his supposed "vast arsenal" of weapons of mass destruction, before
the "proof" emerged in the form of a nuclear mushroom cloud.
'You Can Run,
But You Can't Hide'
On Oct.
28, just five days before the Presidential election, the FBI announced a
criminal investigation, to determine whether Halliburton Co., which was
chaired for five years by Dick Cheney (1995-2000), illegally got billions
of dollars in no-bid contracts from the Bush Administration, to run Iraq's
oil sector, following the U.S. invasion and occupation. The criminal
probe, touching on Cheney, was launched in response to allegations by Army
Corps of Engineers senior contracting officer Bunnatine Greenhouse, who
charged that she came under pressure from her superiors to drop opposition
to Halliburton's five-year no-bid contract. The Greenhouse charges were
featured in Time magazine, on Oct. 24.
In a
letter to the acting Secretary of the Army, Greenhouse's attorney, Michael
Kohn, charged that Gen. Robert Griffin and other top Army Corps of
Engineers officials admonished her for questioning the Halliburton
contract, which was approved on the eve of the March 2003 U.S. invasion of
Iraq. The letter detailed a February 2003 meeting at the Pentagon,
attended by top Halliburton executives and Army officials, at which the $7
billion no-bid contract was discussed. Greenhouse objected to the presence
of the Halliburton executives, and to the terms of the contract itself,
arguing that the no-bid deal should be restricted to one year, and then
opened to competitive bidding. The next day, she received a copy of the
five-year contract, unchanged, and was ordered by superiors to sign it.
According to Kohn's letter, which was also provided to Congressional
offices, Greenhouse was threatened with demotion, for raising a stink
about the Halliburton deal.
Rep.
Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Government
Reform Committee—which is now investigating billions of dollars in other
Halliburton no-bid contracts under the United Nations-administered Oil for
Food Program, and its successor Coalition Provisional
Authority-administered Development Fund for Iraq—issued a statement on the
Greenhouse case: "These charges," he told Time, "undercut months of
assertions by Administration officials that the Halliburton contract was
on the level."
Now FBI
agents are set to interview Greenhouse and other Pentagon officials about
the deal. They are also gathering documents from Army offices in Texas and
other locations, all related to the Halliburton no-bid contracts.
Associated Press reported on Oct. 28 that "The line of inquiry expands an
earlier FBI investigation into whether Halliburton overcharged taxpayers
for fuel in Iraq, and it elevates to a criminal matter the election-year
question of whether the Bush administration showed favoritism to Vice
President Dick Cheney's former company."
Indeed,
documents already released by the Army Corps of Engineers confirm that
Cheney Chief of Staff Libby was kept abreast of the Halliburton contract
status on an ongoing basis.
The
Halliburton Axis of Evil
Iraq is
not the only case of Cheney-Halliburton corruption, currently under
criminal investigation. Two other potential Halliburton crimes, both
carried out while Dick Cheney was the company's CEO, are the subjects of
Justice Department inquiries, U.S. Federal grand juries, and foreign
criminal probes.
The
first case involves $180 million in bribes, allegedly paid to Nigerian
government officials by a consortium headed by Halliburton, which was
seeking a monopoly on natural gas development in that oil- and gas-rich
West African country. The case is being investigated by the U.S.
Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, French
public prosecutor Renaud Van Ruymbeke, and the Nigerian Economic and
Financial Crime Commission.
The
French probe not only is targetting the bribes to Nigerian government
officials; it also is focussing on $132 million, passed by the
Halliburton-led consortium to British attorney Jeffrey Tesler, some of
which, French investigators believe, may have been laundered back into the
United States through offshore accounts, for use by the Republican Party
in the 2000 elections. According to a report prepared by Sen. Frank
Lautenberg (D-N.J.), titled "Ten Halliburton Scandals: Ten Billion in U.S.
Contracts, Zero Senate Hearings": French magistrate Van Ruymbeke "has said
that embezzlement charges could ultimately be filed against Cheney himself
in a French court. In 2000, France joined the United States and more than
30 other countries in outlawing bribery of foreign public officials under
the auspices of a convention negotiated through the Paris-based
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development."
Another
explosive probe of Halliburton deals with the company's creation of a
fictitious offshore subsidiary, to do business in Iran, in violation of a
number of Federal statutes, including the Trading with the Enemy Act. In
July 2004, after three years of investigation by the Treasury Department's
Office of Foreign Assets Control, the case was referred to the Justice
Department, which opened a criminal grand jury investigation in Houston,
Texas.
At the
center of the controversy is Halliburton Products and Services Ltd., a
company founded in the Cayman Islands—outside the reach of U.S. laws,
banning certain economic cooperation with Iran, a country on the State
Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, and one of three "rogue
states" identified by President George W. Bush in his January 2002 State
of the Union address as part of the "Axis of Evil."
A
January 2004 investigation by CBS "60 Minutes" producer Leslie Stahl
confirmed that the Halliburton Cayman Islands subsidiary, in fact, doesn't
exist. It has no employees and no office on the island—merely a letter
drop which forwards all mail back to Halliburton headquarters in Houston.
Its only operations are run out of the Dubai offices of Kellogg Brown
& Root, the wholly owned unit of the American Halliburton
Co.
Senator
Lautenberg has spearheaded the Senate probe into Cheney and Halliburton,
and he dubbed the Iran dealings, which today are up to over $40 million a
year in sales and services to the Islamic Republic, "serious and willful
violations" of U.S. sanctions laws. "It's unconscionable that an American
company would skirt the law to help Iran generate revenues."
Not to
be forgotten is the fact that Cheney's "golden parachute" from Halliburton
yielded him tens of millions of dollars, that he still receives annual
deferred payments from Halliburton, and he holds 440,000 stock options in
the firm—while claiming that he has been divested of any Halliburton
interests since becoming Vice President.
The Valerie
Plame Case
Beyond
his Halliburton corruption, the Vice President is also in the eye of
another storm—with serious potential criminal consequences. In July 2003,
syndicated columnist Robert Novak exposed the identity of an undercover
CIA officer, Valerie Plame, who happened to also be the wife of Ambassador
Joseph Wilson. In February 2002, at the behest of the CIA, Ambassador
Wilson, who served in both Iraq and Niger during a distinguished career as
a foreign service officer, travelled to the African state, to probe
reports that Iraq was seeking a large quantity of "yellowcake," a uranium
precursor used in nuclear bombs. The Wilson trip came directly as the
result of a query by Vice President Cheney, about alleged Niger government
documents obtained by the Italian secret service, SISMI, pointing to the
Iraq-Niger yellowcake deals.
Wilson
concluded that the reports were false, and his findings were passed by the
CIA to senior White House officials. Ultimately, in early March 2003,
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei
revealed that the Niger documents, which had been subsequently obtained by
the CIA and shared with IAEA analysts, were shoddy forgeries.
Several
days after Dr. ElBaradei made these revelations at a United Nations
Security Council session, Joe Wilson appeared on CNN TV, and reminded
Administration officials that they had some knowledge about the Niger
yellowcake affair.
According to EIR's most well-informed government sources,
the Wilson TV appearance triggered a meeting in the Vice President's
Office, to "get Joe Wilson." When Wilson penned an op-ed for the New
York Times in early July 2003, detailing his Niger mission, the Novak
leak appeared targetting his wife, a career CIA "non-official cover"
officer, involved in sensitive overseas work, tracking weapons of mass
destruction.
Senior
CIA officers were incensed that Novak openly boasted that he had been
given Plame's name by two senior White House officials. It is one thing
when an enemy spy, like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen, provides the names
of undercover U.S. intelligence officers. It is another thing entirely,
when top White House officials reveal such information, in an act of
political revenge.
After
months of stalling by Attorney General John Ashcroft, evidence surfaced of
Ashcroft's long-standing ties to one of the White House leak suspects,
Karl Rove. Ashcroft was forced to recuse himself from the case, and the
Deputy Attorney General, Robert Comey, immediately appointed an
independent counsel, Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, to find and
prosecute the leakers.
Sources
have informed EIR that the Plame leak probe has zeroed in on
Cheney's office. They indicate that a top aide to the Vice President, John
Hannah, has already confessed to leaking the name to reporters—at the
behest of Cheney Chief of Staff Libby. One remaining question is whether
Libby acted on his own, or on the orders of Cheney or some other White
House higher-up.
The
Fitzpatrick grand jury has been reportedly stalled, in the run-up to the
Presidential elections, but one well-placed intelligence source reported
that, if Bush-Cheney are re-elected, "You will see the Administration
swamped by Watergate-like scandals, including the Plame
affair."
Beyond
Dick Cheney's own looming day in court, many of the Administration's
leading neo-con officials and fellow-travellers, are facing an array of
scandals, some involving espionage. Sources report that several top
officials in the office of Undersecretary of Defense Feith are under
investigation for leaking national security secrets to Israel and Iran.
Among the reported targets of these probes are : Harold Rhode, David
Wurmser, Michael Maloof, and Col. William Brunner. Feith underling Larry
Franklin is the subject of an ongoing spy probe, centered around
classified documents he allegedly passed to Israeli Embassy officials, via
the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the semi-official
Israeli lobby in the U.S.A.
These
investigations are deadly serious, and they must be completed—regardless
of the outcome on Nov. 2. Cheney and his neo-con allies have caused
near-irreversible damage to America's standing in the world. If they are
guilty of criminal acts, including passing classified material to foreign
governments, trading with the enemy, violating the Foreign Corrupt
Practices Act, and leaking the identities of undercover U.S. intelligence
officers, they must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Such
actions would go a long way toward repairing America's standing around the
globe—and would go a long way towards assuring that the neo-con menace
does not crawl out of its hole anytime in the near future. |
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